Tag: Parliament Hill

People gathered in downtown Ottawa on November 29, 2015 for a fun and friendly march at Parliament Hill. Attended by individuals, groups, and families, the event was held right before the UN Climate Summit in Paris, France. People were celebrating climate solutions and encouraged the Canadian government to be more proactive about climate change.

The march – 100% Possible: Marching for Climate Solutions and Justice – is just one of the many similar events organized around the globe that time. It was the flagship event in Canada and lasted for more than 3 hours at Parliament Hill, Ottawa’s seat of government.

Participants came all wearing green, the color that symbolizes renewable energy, hope, and the environment in general. Everyone got creative with what they wore to the event and there were flyers, banners, and posters all designed to encourage participation and collaboration for nature’s sake because a clean economy, especially in Canada, is 100% possible.

The city of Ottawa, barely two hours from Montreal and about 4 hours from Toronto, is easy to get to. The event was well attended because buses were available to shuttle participants to and from Ottawa. Due to the availability of transportation, more people signed up for the event, making it a huge success.

Applause was heard in our headquarters and in the crowd when we heard about the number of people enumerated in our march: 25,000 people * took to the streets of Ottawa today to spread our message for the climate!

Some people have said that our march would not work, that people in Ottawa would not walk, that people in Montreal would not move, that Toronto was too far away and that climate issues would not be of interest to families and communities. workers.

Today, 25,000 people have proven that they are wrong: climate change is the moral issue of our century and the solutions to this crisis are becoming more evident and gaining popularity every day.

We know we can not do anything and watch climate change put our world at risk.

Corroborating the latest Nanos poll launched last week that said 73% of Canadians believe climate change is a threat to their economic future, the crowd was loud, flashy and loud to get their message across:

A 100% renewable economy by 2050 is 100% possible!

Scientists have said: we must do it. Some politicians have said: we CAN do it.

On the eve of the Climate Change Conference in Paris, Canadians joined the voices of citizens in more than 200 cities around the world calling for concrete actions to fight climate change.

There are moments when history is built, moments when the popularity of a message makes it so inevitable that even the most intransigent politicians are swept away by the wave.

Today could be one of those moments .

* About the crowd: Gilles Lamothe, professor of statistics at the University of Ottawa shared his methodology: He used the Jacob method to estimate the number of people on Parliament Hill. From a photo of the crowd, he estimated the area occupied by the crowd at 7,550 square meters and the density of the crowd at three people per square meter. With the march of error, he estimated that the number of people present was between 20 385 to 24 915, excluding the few thousand people left before the end of the march.

A huge whoop just went up around the office and the crowd as the official crowd count came in. 25,000 people took to the streets in sub zero temperatures to join our positive call for climate solutions!

They said it couldn’t be done, that people in Ottawa wouldn’t march, that people in Montreal (who do march) wouldn’t make the trip, that Toronto was too far, that “environmental” issues wouldn’t attract workers, christians, students, families, and government workers.

Today 25,000 of us proved them wrong: climate change is the biggest moral issue of our times and the movement to solve it continues to grow each and every month. We know we can’t sit on the sidelines and let the climate crisis continue to unfold around us without doing something about it.

The movement’s strength in Canada is also supported by Friday’s poll released by Nanos research, which found 73 per cent of Canadians agree that “climate change presents a significant threat to our economic future”. The crowd today looked like a cross section of Canada.

Indigenous elders and frontline communities, small children grinning from strollers, teenagers chanting their hearts out, raging grannies, First Nations grandmothers and children, and so many others of all ages in colourful shades of green. Signs were equally split between French and English.

One last thing on the crowd count. Gilles Lamothe, statistician professor at the University of Ottawa, shared his methodology. He used Jacob’s method to estimate the number of people at the Hill. From a photograph, he estimated the surface area that was occupied by the crowd at about 7,550 square meters and also the density of the crowd at about 3 persons per square meter. With the margin of error, he estimated the number of people at the hill to be between 20,385 to 24,915, with a few thousand that left before the marched reached the Hill, 90 mins after the start.